2018-2022 Tel Aviv-Yafo Academic College. Vice-President, academic affairs. 2009-2016 Founding Director of Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain-Sciences (ELSC) 2004 -2017 * Member of the Hebrew University Senate * The Jack H. Skirball Chair & Research Fund in Brain Research 2002-2016 Department of Physiology, Hadassah Medical School
Motor cortex is active during covert motor acts, such as action observation and mental rehearsal,... more Motor cortex is active during covert motor acts, such as action observation and mental rehearsal, when muscles are quiescent. Such neuronal activity, which is thought to be similar to the activity underlying overt movement, is exploited by neural prosthetics to afford subjects control of an external effector. We compared neural activity in primary motor cortex of monkeys who controlled a cursor using either their arm or a brain-machine interface (BMI) to identify what features of neural activity are similar or dissimilar in these two control contexts. Neuronal population activity parcellates into orthogonal subspaces, with some representations that are unique to arm movements and others that are shared between arm and BMI control. The shared subspace is invariant to the effector used and to biomechanical details of the movement, revealing a representation that reflects movement intention. This intention representation is likely the signal extracted by BMI algorithms for cursor contr...
The Israel Society for Neuroscience—ISFN—was founded in 1993 by a group of Israeli leading scient... more The Israel Society for Neuroscience—ISFN—was founded in 1993 by a group of Israeli leading scientists conducting research in the area of neurobiology. The primary goal of the society was to promote and disseminate the knowledge and understanding acquired by its members, and to strengthen interactions between them. Since then, the society holds its annual meeting every year in Eilat usually during December. At this annual meetings, the senior Israeli neurobiologists, their teams, and their graduate students, as well as foreign scientists and students, present their recent research findings in platform and poster presentations, and the program of the meeting is mainly based on the 338 received abstracts which are published in this volume. The meeting also offers the opportunity for the researchers to exchange information with each other, often leading to the initiation of collaborative studies. Both the number of members of the society and those participating in the annual meeting is ...
We carry with us a fairly detailed memory of the immediate past. In the course of time, a huge bu... more We carry with us a fairly detailed memory of the immediate past. In the course of time, a huge bulk of information passes through this memory, but only a fraction remains available for long periods. It is generally accepted that the memory of the near past is carried by the electric activity of the cerebral nerve cells. This assumption is based mainly on two arguments: (a) It is hard to conceive of any mechanism whereby stored information could be continuously modified to encompass an endless spectrum of variations except by electrical activity. (b) Any major disturbance of the electrical activity of the brain (such as electro-shock, hypoglycemic shock or concussion) disrupts the memory of events preceding the disturbance.
The spontaneous and acoustically driven activities of single units, pairs and triplets of units i... more The spontaneous and acoustically driven activities of single units, pairs and triplets of units in the auditory cortex were analyzed. Data were obtained in two sets of experiments from nonbehaving awake cats and from a behaving monkey. The results of the two sets of experiments indicated that neighboring neurons usually fire independently. The weak correlations found between pairs of adjacent neurons were mostly indicative of a common input driving both units. In some cases, signs of synaptic interaction between the neurons were found. When triplets of units were considered, it was found that several independent inputs exist, even within a small group of adjacent neurons. When such small groups of neurons were studied in the behaving monkey, it was found that the temporal firing pattern of single neurons and the interactions between pairs of neurons were in some cases dependent on the behavioral state and on the sensorimotor association.
Motor cortex is active during covert motor acts, such as action observation and mental rehearsal,... more Motor cortex is active during covert motor acts, such as action observation and mental rehearsal, when muscles are quiescent. Such neuronal activity, which is thought to be similar to the activity underlying overt movement, is exploited by neural prosthetics to afford subjects control of an external effector. We compared neural activity in primary motor cortex of monkeys who controlled a cursor using either their arm or a brain-machine interface (BMI) to identify what features of neural activity are similar or dissimilar in these two control contexts. Neuronal population activity parcellates into orthogonal subspaces, with some representations that are unique to arm movements and others that are shared between arm and BMI control. The shared subspace is invariant to the effector used and to biomechanical details of the movement, revealing a representation that reflects movement intention. This intention representation is likely the signal extracted by BMI algorithms for cursor contr...
The Israel Society for Neuroscience—ISFN—was founded in 1993 by a group of Israeli leading scient... more The Israel Society for Neuroscience—ISFN—was founded in 1993 by a group of Israeli leading scientists conducting research in the area of neurobiology. The primary goal of the society was to promote and disseminate the knowledge and understanding acquired by its members, and to strengthen interactions between them. Since then, the society holds its annual meeting every year in Eilat usually during December. At this annual meetings, the senior Israeli neurobiologists, their teams, and their graduate students, as well as foreign scientists and students, present their recent research findings in platform and poster presentations, and the program of the meeting is mainly based on the 338 received abstracts which are published in this volume. The meeting also offers the opportunity for the researchers to exchange information with each other, often leading to the initiation of collaborative studies. Both the number of members of the society and those participating in the annual meeting is ...
We carry with us a fairly detailed memory of the immediate past. In the course of time, a huge bu... more We carry with us a fairly detailed memory of the immediate past. In the course of time, a huge bulk of information passes through this memory, but only a fraction remains available for long periods. It is generally accepted that the memory of the near past is carried by the electric activity of the cerebral nerve cells. This assumption is based mainly on two arguments: (a) It is hard to conceive of any mechanism whereby stored information could be continuously modified to encompass an endless spectrum of variations except by electrical activity. (b) Any major disturbance of the electrical activity of the brain (such as electro-shock, hypoglycemic shock or concussion) disrupts the memory of events preceding the disturbance.
The spontaneous and acoustically driven activities of single units, pairs and triplets of units i... more The spontaneous and acoustically driven activities of single units, pairs and triplets of units in the auditory cortex were analyzed. Data were obtained in two sets of experiments from nonbehaving awake cats and from a behaving monkey. The results of the two sets of experiments indicated that neighboring neurons usually fire independently. The weak correlations found between pairs of adjacent neurons were mostly indicative of a common input driving both units. In some cases, signs of synaptic interaction between the neurons were found. When triplets of units were considered, it was found that several independent inputs exist, even within a small group of adjacent neurons. When such small groups of neurons were studied in the behaving monkey, it was found that the temporal firing pattern of single neurons and the interactions between pairs of neurons were in some cases dependent on the behavioral state and on the sensorimotor association.
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Papers by Eilon Vaadia